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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 51, 11 November 1933, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Events in Cuba are moving toward a crisis. The strike wave is coming up again. The struggle against American imperialism is taking a violent form in the cities. In the interior the situation is still deadlocked: the workers hold some mills and plantations as guarantees of their demands for higher wages and better conditions while the soldiers and student bands of the Caribbean Army sent against them have not come to grips with the workers except in one or two cases.
But this state of affairs cannot long continue. One way or another they must be resolve definitely in the interests of the workers or the American imperialists and their Cuban bourgeois servants. The sugar crop in Cuba matures in autumn or early winter. The harvesting begins in December. It is the aim of the government to drive the workers off the seized plantations, before the harvest season comes round to insure the American and Cuban owners their vested rights and whatever potential profit there is in the crop.
The workers on the plantations who are armed and organized to some extent will resist the attempt to evict them. In the one or two attempts to evict them that have already taken place the workers have demonstrated that. The coming conflict may develop into a widespread civil war. If the government is successful the United States warships will not land their complement of devil dogs.
But if the fighting should go the other way through the going over of the soldiers to the workers as is not impossible, the American imperialists may resort to armed intervention. The capitalist press reports that the Washington administration is looking for a formula by which it can land marines.
The difficulty here is the result this action and its consequences in Cuba would have in Latin America. Today the Latin American aspect of the question is at an acute stage. The attempt to drive the workers off the plantations coincides in time with the Pan-American Congress which is to convene shortly in Montevideo. For the United States capitalists this congress is an extremely important one. They will make a determined effort there to “adjust” the South and Latin American markets in the interests of “our” own trade. Any misstep in Cuba may tip the scales at Montevideo in favor of [the] English, which have been making inroads into these markets at the expense of the American brigands.
But if the policy of Yankee piracy is beset with difficulties from its trade rivalries it is unhampered by the international working class outside of Cuba. Nowhere is there a broad movement of the workers in defense of the struggling Cuban workers. The responsibility rests, in the first instance, on the Stalinized Comintern.
The policy of the Comintern in the Cuban revolution is also the policy of the Communist Party of the United States, which of all the Communist parties outside of the Cuban party is the most directly involved in the struggle against American armed intervention. There is no movement in the United States. The Communist Party of the United States has demonstrated again its conception of internationalism. Its agitation is confined to articles in the Daily Worker and forum lectures. Demonstrations? There was one puny affair of the “vanguard” in Philadelphia. There may have been one or two others. But there has been no serious attempt to build a movement of support to the Cuban workers! Are the American Stalinists under orders not to “interfere” with the success of Litvinoff diplomatic mission?
It is now the immediate, burning task of the advanced section of the American working class to come to the aid of the Cuban workers.
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